VFX news from Europe's IBC

Although most of the technology showed at this years IBC wasn’t exclusive and had been seen at previous shows, there was still a geeky buzz around products like the Black Magic Camera and Sony’s 4K screens, which were very impressive.

Since my favourite aspect of VFX is compositing, so I went straight to The Foundry, Adobe, Autodesk and Assimilate Scratch who all had great updates on their products.

The Foundry

The Foundry demonstrated their new feature list from Nuke version 7. Notice it isn’t a 6.4 or 6.5 etc - it’s a brand new version number. From what was demonstrated, the quantity and quality of new features really do warrant a new version number, as The Foundry’s product manager, Jon Walden said to me excitedly while showing me updates like the 3d camera track with the image modeller in Nuke. Very impressive.

The other big “killer” application was The Foundry’s Shot Management, Review and Conform tool which seems to be targeted towards commercials VFX facilities as apposed to film facilities and workflow.

Assimilate

I also met my friend Roman over at Assimilate where he showed me the latest version of Scratch. They seem to have redesigned the compositing side of the excellent grading and reviews tool, but to me it felt that Scratch shouldn’t be seen as a compositing tool over and above all the other things it does so well. I can see the compositing feature being used for quick-slap comps but the workflow and interface felt too cumbersome when compared to Nuke or Fusion, and in fact works very much like Autodesk’s Combustion schematic view.

Autodesk

Speaking of Autodesk, their presentations are always big and loud and the usual Flame and Flare presentations were being shown to demonstrate the “collaborative workflow” targeted more towards the commercials post houses.

Adobe

The highlight of the show for me had to be Adobe, with their Adobe creative suite, Touch apps and Adobe Cloud toolsets getting better each time. The presentations were not only enjoyable but informative, with the the Adobe Creative Suite workflow presented by the passionate Adobe Evangelist Jason Levine.